WIP Driving experience

[Mr Whippy]

Yep it's very good all considered.

With Ruud's new batch tool and some shader file tweaks it might even get the FPS up even more... but all considered it's really not bad!


Obviously more focus needs to be put into the real road design elements. I found myself crashing far too much even at normal speeds because it was hard to 'read' what was coming.

So signs, speed limit signs indicating what is coming next etc etc... but they are not a big problem all said and done either.


It'd be cool to get those wind turbines spinning!


Dave

 

[aadilf1]

Suggestion: More country roads

 

[Harey]

Suggestion: More WINDING country roads

There you go, I fixed it lol

 

[Mr Whippy]

Hehe you'll like my long time WIP track which is a winding hilly country road

Shame its been 7 years in the making and still only 20% done

I like realistic real roads too. So many games are so boring to drive on.

Real winding roads for the win!

 

[skybh]

The most annoying in a track, is the detailling, with 3dsmax you can get a nice shape of road in less than 30min, ok but just a road with a flat terrain :/

 

[Mr Whippy]

Yep the work is in details hehe!

There gets a point where you have to dig in and add those details and it just takes oodles of time... But it's really worth it too

This is where oodles of reference materials and planning and a concept drawn out make life easier so it becomes two tasks. Ideas and planning, then build... As soon as they get mixed is when you do a lot of work a go nowhere... As I've learnt haha

 

[aadilf1]

hehe thanks harey! I was actually thinking of winding roads :O

 

[Mr Whippy]

Has anyone made some nice cameras for this course, and perhaps some nice looping splines to reset to or whatever else, maybe working pits positions.

It's a shame in Racer there is no elegant way to make many starting positions and force a reset to preferred ones, ie, maybe reset 1, 2 ,3 etc would reset you to that starting point (via console command in that case)

Hmmm

Good track just it's annoying having no nice replays or easy way to get to different places on it.

Dave

 

[Stereo]

car warp # # with traffic waypoints would work, but is not very user friendly because you need to know the waypoint locations & what number your car is. Pretty easy to lay them out at some major points though.

Haven't tested whether the qscript equivalent will run on a player car. If so it could be mapped to a keyboard shortcut and thus be more useable. (eg. up/down keys to warp to the next/previous)

 

[Mr Whippy]

Good thinking Stereo!

Script can check your ID and the send the warp command

Just need some nice cameras then hehe

Dave

 

[Stereo]

Was a very straightforward script, it turns out.
http://nmurdoch.ca/scripts/warpscript.rsx

Put this in a track with traffic waypoints (<track>/scripts/paint/warpscript.rsx), and you can warp to them using keyboard shortcuts.
Ctrl+Up: select next waypoint
Ctrl+Down: select previous waypoint
Ctrl+Enter: warp to selected waypoint
It'll display in the lower left of the screen which waypoint you have selected, so you can go to a particular number.

Now just needs a traffic.ini update for this track and a guide to which waypoints are where and it'll be nice and convenient.

 

[aadilf1]

Was a very straightforward script, it turns out.
http://nmurdoch.ca/scripts/warpscript.rsx

Put this in a track with traffic waypoints, and you can warp to them using keyboard shortcuts.
Ctrl+Up: select next waypoint
Ctrl+Down: select previous waypoint
Ctrl+Enter: warp to selected waypoint
It'll display in the lower left of the screen which waypoint you have selected, so you can go to a particular number.

Now just needs a traffic.ini update for this track and a guide to which waypoints are where and it'll be nice and convenient.

So I put this in the main polish roads folder? Then what do I do to get the traffic to move around? and what do i put in traffic.ini

 

[Mr Whippy]

This isn't for traffic, it's using traffic waypoints for the user to warp to, so they can pick certain points on the track and warp directly to them rather than only starting in one place all the time.

Ie, want to start on the highway, cycle to point 5 and go. No need to always drive from that same starting point on the street.



This is a really great innovative use of the traffic system Stereo...

It would be great if we could somehow author in our own mini-map (I guess we can via track scripts again?)

I suppose with appropriate code you could plot your location on that map, and when you cycle points show another graphic to show where you will appear.

A bit more in-depth but an interesting use of the track script to make a better map and show where you will spawn.



But yeah we could do with a nice generic set of traffic then we can populate tracks like this and Polish Roads with some traffic and some life!
This track itself has plenty of cars. Using the new DOF import tool we could just grab a load of these cars for now and make some nice traffic sets. They don't really need fantastic car.ini or sound sets or anything. Hmmm


Dave

 

[Stereo]

Yeah, if you made a top-down graphic at a known scale (into a texture), it would be pretty straightforward to mark the player location, waypoints, and whatever else on it dynamically.

I haven't tried painting a texture to the screen through a script yet but the rest's definitely doable. Will do some fooling around.
EDIT: can't get painting a texture to work unfortunately. Rectangles do work and text of course works. Could mark the locations of the waypoints on a popup rectangle but don't know how useful that is.

 

[Mr Whippy]

Typical haha.

It's a shame these features are added but never apparently tested because it does make development frustrating.

Please do add it to the bug list on the release thread, hopefully when Ruud is free'd up a bit again he can fix these kinds of issues for us

I guess a cool idea would be to have traffic, then have a load of starting points with values like 2000 upwards (or higher?) which are the reserved ones used for starting position options.

You could even have it randomly spawn you at different ones, unless you specifically choose them hehe... hmmmmm... that might be a cool option if we don't have a map, you could soon cycle through the 8 or so spawn points you'd set.

I wonder how it could work in multi-player. Hmmmm...

Dave

 

[drive right]

Just want to say that this track is the only track I drive on in racer so far! It's great! Like others mentioned, the curves on the highway could be gentler and the on and off ramps could be longer to accommodate acceleration and slowing down. Keep it up, plz!

I like the idea of starting points, who doesn't want to back out of driveways, pull out of flat car parks or curbside parking to drive? More realistic

 

[aadilf1]

Has there been any more updates to this awesome track?